can such drivers be moved out of kernel? what exactly stops that?

why do they even need to be in kernel repo and not brought at/after install time?

drewg123 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Linux is actively hostile to out-of-tree drivers. There is no stable driver API, and interfaces change at the drop of a hat. Maintaining an out of tree driver is a constant nightmare where you're always dealing with interfaces changing out from under you.

I wrote and maintained 10GbE drivers for a small company in the 2000s, and just the SHIM file for our driver on Linux to massage over API differences was well over 1000 lines. I think it was close to the same size as the entire driver for one of the BSDs.

	▲	terryot 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A counterpoint: I recently asked Claude to port an obsolete ~2010 driver to latest kernel by asking Claude to "make it work". Few builds later and few crashes later, I had a working driver, with DMA, modern Io map protection, etc. It's not a nightmare anymore to port drivers
	▲	achierius 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		GP meant moving the driver into userspace, which is much less painful due to the stable userspace APIs.

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gslepak 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> why do they even need to be in kernel

People have been asking this question since Linux was first invented…

	▲	s20n 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I could never in a million years have imagined that LLM-slop driven fuzzing would become the ultimate vindication for the microkernel philosophy